...Many Hispanic families in New Mexico have long known that they had indigenous ancestry, even though some here still call themselves "Spanish" to emphasize their Iberian ties and to differentiate themselves from the state's 23 federally recognized tribes, as well as from Mexican and other Latin American immigrants.

But genetic testing is offering a glimpse into a more complex story. The DNA of Hispanic people from New Mexico is often in the range of 30 to 40 percent Native American, according to Miguel A. Tórrez, 42, a research technologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and one of New Mexico's most prominent genealogists.

..."I have Navajo, Chippewa, Greek and Spanish blood lines," said Mr. Tórrez, who calls himself a mestizo, a term referring to mixed ancestry. "I can't say I'm indigenous any more than I can say I'm Greek, but it's both fascinating and disturbing to see how various cultures came together in New Mexico."...

Mina is staring over the edge of the George Washington Bridge when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the officers she’s not about to jump but they don’t believe her. Her husband, Oscar is called to pick her up.

Oscar hopes that leaving New York for a few months will give Mina the space to heal. They travel to London, to an apartment wall-papered with indigo-eyed birds, to Oscars oldest friends, to a canal and blooming flower market.

Mina, a classicist, searches for solutions to her failing mental health using mythological women.

But she finds a beam of light in a living woman. Friendship and attraction blossom until Oscar and Mina’s complicated love is tested.

Without Borders Festival IV: Between You and Me, Lord Gallery (1200 Afro picks, gold leaf, rocking chair, book of poetry)

Eleanor Kipping is a socially engaged artist and educator. Her interdisciplinary creative practice is concerned with the Black female experience as Other in the United States regarding hair politics, colorism, and racial passing and how these topics may be explored at the intersection(s) of installation, performance, and social practice. She holds a BS from the New England School of Communications, an MFA from the University of Maine and has participated in residencies at Skowhegan and Gakko in Japan. Kipping is the 2019 Art Practice Artist-in-Residence.

Throughout Katherine Johnsonâs extraordinary career, there hasnât been a boundary she hasnât broken through or a ceiling she hasnât shattered. In the early 1950s, she joined the organization that would one day become NASA, and which had only just begun to hire black mathematicians. Her job there was to analyze data and calculate the complex equations needed for successful space flights. As a black woman in an era of brutal racism and sexism, Katherine faced daily challenges and often wasnât taken seriously by the scientists and engineers she worked with. But her colleagues couldnât ignore her obvious giftsâor her persistence. Soon she was computing the trajectory for Alan Shepardâs first flight and working on the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon. Katherineâs life has been a succession of achievements, each one greater than the last.

Katherine Johnsonâs story was made famous in the bestselling book and Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures. Now in Reaching for the Moon she tells her own story for the first time, in a lively autobiography that will inspire young readers everywhere.

The artist begins performance before audience enters the space. She writes i will not say nigger on a large sheet of charcoal covered brown paper. An hour passes. She begins her monologue by asking audience and herself who the word nigger belongs to, who has the right to use it, and who exactly is a nigger. She concludes that she is a nigger and begins to remove her eurocentric makeup and dress. She stands nude before the audience, revealing her natural hair and skin color and speaks in open confession on the reasons that her ‘light skin is not right skin’ and changes her entire outfit to that more stereotypical of a black female. She packs her white identity into a suitcase and returns to writing lines until she is alone.

The black female experience is heavily dominated by the constant need to navigate the spaces within and between dominant cultures. Many black and brown females are too familiar others monitoring their behavior, language, and appearance, and have to choose where and how they will relate to dominant standards. Despite their double-consciousness, they are still situated as âotherâ within society. These experiences define their identities and sense of self.

“I Will Not Say Nigger” explores the language and exchanges that take place between dominant and minority cultures/races, but often go unaddressed. The unspoken is present in relationships, the workplace, and other social encounters. They are subtle, difficult to define, and are often brushed under the rug, yet reveal that we are far from the post-racial society that so many insist exists. The character that you in see this piece explores the spectrum of these experiences through her mixed-race identity and shares them in through a spoken and physical confession.

Photo and video shot by Amy Olivia Pierce, edited by Eleanor Kipping, audio recorded live at the University of Maine Innovative Media Research and Commercialization Center.

It wasnât until she moved away from her home state of Maine, the whitest state in the country, that visual artist Eleanor Kipping realized it isnât just her mixed race that affects the way she moves in the world â itâs also her lighter skin tone.

Discrimination toward people based on the shade of their skin, with favor given to fairer tones, is known as colorism â related to racism but often practiced within a specific community of people of color.

âI knew that I was a person of color, but it was in exploring that that I discovered colorism and my light skin in relation to that,â said Kipping, 29, a native of Old Town now back in Maine as a graduate student in the Intermedia MFA program at the University of Maine….

…The images are mounted on frames, on the backside of which is brown paper. The âbrown paper bag test,â for which the installation is named, was a real âtestâ administered by among black people in the late 18th and 19th centuries, in which skin the same tone or lighter than a brown paper bag was deemed desirable for acceptance into black fraternities or social clubs, and darker was not…

Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Connecticut, and Berlin, following Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and Yukiâs son Jay who, as an adult in the present day, is forced to confront his motherâs abandonment of him when he was only two years old.

The novel opens when Yuki is sixteen and her father is posted back to Japan. Though she and her family have been living as outsiders in New York City, Yuki opts to stay, intoxicated by her friendship with the beautiful aspiring model Odile, the energy of the city, and her desire to become an artist. But when she becomes involved with an older man and the relationship turns destructive, Yukiâs life is unmoored. Harmless Like You is a suspenseful novel about the complexities of identity, art, adolescent friendships, and familial bonds that asksâand ultimately answersâhow does a mother desert her son?

Bold and unapologetic, Karen Shepardâs Kiss Me Someone is inhabited by women who walk the line between various states: adolescence and adulthood, stability and uncertainty, selfishness and compassion. They navigate the obstacles that come with mixed-race identity and instabilities in social class, and they use their liminal positions to leverage power. They employ rage and tenderness and logic and sex, but for all of their rationality theyâre drawn to self-destructive behavior. Shepardâs stories explore what we do to lessen our burdens of sadness and isolation; her characters, fiercely true to themselves, are caught between their desire to move beyond their isolation and a fear that itâs exactly where they belong.

In June of 1870, seventy-five Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams, Massachusetts, to work for Calvin Sampson, one of the biggest industrialists in that busy factory town. Except for the foreman, the Chinese didnât speak English. They didnât know they were strikebreakers. The eldest of them was twenty-two.

Combining historical and fictional elements, The Celestials beautifully reimagines the story of Sampsonâs âChinese experimentâ and the effect of the newcomersâ threatening and exotic presence on the New England locals. When Sampsonâs wife, Julia, gives birth to a mixed-race baby, the infant becomes a lightning rod for the novelâs conflicts concerning identity, alienation, and exile.